


i'll think about tomorrow (if i can get through tonight)

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Series: revengers AU: thanos doesn't show up immediately and ruin everything [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU: Thanos doesn't show up immediately to ruin everything, Family, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mostly Gen, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Team as Family, The Revengers - Freeform, Thorsweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-20 01:02:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: Bruce contemplates where, and whether, he belongs amongst Thor's people.[ Based on the Thorsweek promptFamily]





	i'll think about tomorrow (if i can get through tonight)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a completed oneshot, originally posted in a multi-chapter "series of oneshots" called _between here and the edge of the universe_. The idea of smushing a bunch of oneshots into one work has bugged me since I posted it, so I'm reworking my formatting. If you've already read this — welcome back! If you left comments there, don't worry, your comments live on forever in my heart and in my inbox. ♥
> 
> This takes place after Ragnarok, assuming at least a hefty time gap between the destruction of Asgard and the arrival of Thanos, _or_ in some wonderful alternate universe where Thanos doesn't exist. Reader's choice.
> 
> Enjoy!

It’s always tough, returning to himself after a long stint as the Hulk.

Last time, the Big Guy took them to a whole other  _planet._ He just — shuttled the both of them away from Earth and crash-landed them on some place apparently called Sakaar, a foreign hellhole of a planet that reeked of garbage and several different kinds of cheap perfume at all hours of the day, a planet that was home to the weirdest motley assortment of species Bruce could ever have imagined, a planet that was run by a guy who enlisted the Hulk in some kind of gladiator match for  _two years._

This time, according to Thor, it’s been four weeks and five days.

Four weeks and five days since he jumped from that ship, four weeks and five days since he launched himself between all those innocent people on the bridge in Asgard and a feral wolf the size of a building. Much less than two years, and much,  _much_ less than what he’d thought it’d be.

Not that he  _had_ thought much, at the time. Not really. Stacked against hundreds of lives, the possibility of the Hulk taking over for the rest of his life was… kind of a non-factor. At least that had been his mindset.

Four weeks and five days. About a month. Thirty-three days.

Huh.

Bad, but not terrible, all things considered.

That is, until Thor tells him everything he’s missed.

“The whole— the whole  _planet?”_ he asks. It’s all he can think to ask at first, as he tugs the blanket tighter around his shoulders, as his heart becomes a lead weight that’s plummeted straight into his stomach. “All of it?”

Thor, sitting beside him on the little cot, heaves a sigh without looking away from the opposite wall. “I’m afraid so.”

Somewhere in the back of Bruce’s mind, he can see it, or he thinks he can. A streak of reddish orange across velvet black. A great, violent burst of white. A vague sense of disappointment, of mourning. It’s a memory of the Hulk’s, he can tell. These days the barrier between their thoughts feels more like a thin film than the layers and layers of corrugated steel that it used to be.

But… Asgard’s really gone.

Bruce tries to wrap his head around it. Wonders what it must be like for Thor to have to wrap his head around it.

“Oh, my God,” Bruce says. “Thor, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Thor says with half a shrug, even though it’s definitely, definitely not. “The people are safe. That’s what matters.”

Bruce looks up at him — and that’s normal, Thor’s always been so much bigger than him, even if there’s a blurry sort of feeling that he should be smaller, now, tugging at the back of Bruce’s thoughts. His silhouette is definitely much different from what it should be, though, different even from Bruce’s oldest memories of him. His hair is still all chopped off and uneven like before, like one of his lightning bolts went astray and singed off the hairs in a streak across his temple. And now one of his eyes is  _gone,_ replaced with a deep scar that creeps its way out from beneath a metal eyepatch.

Nothing’s more different, though — more  _jarring_ — than the way he carries himself now, the way his shoulders hang a bit lower, the way his hands fidget in his lap, the way his voice just sounds _heavier._

Bruce feels a little worse for not having been around the past few weeks, but… Well, he’s here now. So he weaves an arm out from beneath the blanket, reaches up and lays his hand over Thor’s back, right between his shoulder blades.

“Yeah. Yeah, they’re safe,” Bruce says. “You did good, man.”

At that, Thor smiles. Just a bit. “Thank you, Bruce.”

 

* * *

 

Life on the Asgardian refugee ship is… odd.

Everyone on the ship is many, many times stronger than him, to the point that it's almost comical. Most of them are several times his age, even the ones that look a decade or so younger than him.

And weirdest of all,  _none_ of them are afraid of him. Not a single one. They've all seen the Big Guy, they all got a firsthand look at what he's capable of. They’re all on a big metal can hurtling through space with the last remnants of their entire civilization, and they're sharing it with a guy who could, with one temper tantrum, reduce the whole damn thing to a pile of scraps.

And rather than be afraid of him, most of the Asgardians even seem to  _like_ him.

Valkyrie treats him like they've been friends for years, not just her and the Big Guy, but her and Bruce. Thor does the same, but that's not really a surprise, given that he and Bruce actually  _have_ been friends for years, more or less. Even Loki's not so much cold around him as he is mildly lukewarm, only avoiding him as much as he avoids anyone else on the ship.

As for the rest of them, Bruce can hardly get through a day without  _someone_ spotting him and pulling him unwittingly into their little group, offering him a drink, excitedly recounting the tale of his battle with Hela's massive wolf. Sometimes they ask him questions about Earth — the kids, especially, beg to hear everything he has to tell about this mysterious planet full of funny little men like him — since Earth is, apparently, where they’re headed.

That part’s always the hardest, though.

Because Bruce doesn’t much like to think about it. Heading to Earth.

“What’s the problem?” Thor asks him. It's a few days after the Hulk finally elected to allow Bruce's return, and he and Thor now sit at a dingy little table in the ship’s mess hall. Thor takes a massive chomp out of the sandwich he’s eating, cleaning up any stray bits of sauce with the back of his hand. “You love Earth.”

Bruce opens his mouth to answer to that, but he hesitates. Because saying he loves Earth is… not exactly wrong, but, well, it just never really occurred to him, did it? Earth was all there  _was,_ for a long, long time. That’d be like telling Thor he loves, like, the  _Universe,_ or something.

Then he remembers that Thor probably  _does_ love the Universe.

Bruce sighs, shrugs, and twirls his strange two-pronged fork in the even stranger noodle-y dish he’s decided to have for dinner. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “Guess it’s just been a while, you know?”

“Aye, that it has,” Thor answers. He’s holding his sandwich in both hands, and he drums the fingers of one hand thoughtfully against it. “But that should only make your return all the better, don’t you think? Surely everyone’s missed you.”

“Everyone?”

“Yeah, of course,” Thor says with a shrug. “Friends, family.”

At that, Bruce hesitates again, for an entirely different reason.

But—

“Yeah,” Bruce answers. Because that’s… not worth getting into. The mood on this ship’s already down enough. Thor’s already down enough. “Yeah, I guess.”

 

* * *

 

“Dr. Banner.”

Bruce actually jumps. “Wow. You, uh… You really do see everything, huh?”

The wide circular window displays a technicolor burst of stars and galaxies, and the tall dark silhouette carved into that bright expanse, at first, doesn’t move. “Your footsteps are lighter than your counterpart’s,” Heimdall says, still facing the cosmos, “but not silent. I heard you.”

“Oh,” Bruce says. “Oh. Yeah. Right.”

“But to answer your question,” says Heimdall, still not turning, “yes, I do.”

And… damn.

What is he supposed to say to that?  _Neat?_ His first instinct is to ask how it works, but something tells him it’d take years before he’d even be in the  _ballpark_ of understanding the physics behind it. Hell, maybe Heimdall himself doesn’t fully understand how it works. The vast majority of human beings couldn’t map out the inner workings of their own eyes, after all.

“You may join me, if you like,” Heimdall says, breaking the silence.

So Bruce does. He hesitates, of course, because the invitation might just be Heimdall being polite — but something in his tone says otherwise.

Bruce makes his way to the window, steps up beside Asgard’s Gatekeeper. The whole of space is stretched out in front of them, galaxies and nebulas and distant planets that he could only have dreamed of observing from Earth. He’s seen it over and over and over again, every time he’s passed a window for the last week, and he still doesn’t expect that he’ll ever be used to it.

“What troubles you, Dr. Banner?”

Bruce blinks, turns to find Heimdall still staring out at the stars with those all-seeing, molten-gold eyes. “Uh… I don’t— I mean… Why do you think something’s troubling me?”

“Because you’re awake, when most of the other occupants of the ship are not.”

“Oh. Right,” Bruce says, deflating. Then he frowns. “Wait, most? Who else is up? You can tell that?”

Heimdall’s eyes shift, like his focus is no longer on the stars in front of them, and he answers, “A young girl on the level below us. The new mother in the healing ward above, and her child. A teenage boy, reading in his quarters.” He pauses, those golden eyes narrowing for a moment, and he adds, almost as an afterthought, “And the Prince. But then, Prince Loki has never adhered to a healthy sleep schedule.”

“That’s… incredible,” Bruce says, “that you can see all that, I mean.”

Heimdall smiles. “Much appreciated.”

They fall into silence for a bit, looking out into the stars. There’s a pair of galaxies orbiting each other; it must be light-years away, but Bruce feels like he could reach out and touch them if he tried. A smear of purplish red can be seen off to the right, between the speckles of white and gold and blue. A dying star, maybe. Or one that’s been dead a long, long time.

“Just thinking about Earth, I guess,” Bruce finally says. “You know. To answer your question.”

Heimdall nods. “You have been gone for quite some time.”

“Yeah,” Bruce answers, wringing his hands together. He can see some blue at the center of that reddish smear — definitely a dying star. Yeah. A supernova, a light-year or two away. He wonders it it was still a living star the last time he was on Earth. “Can you…? Can you see Earth, too?”

“Indeed I can,” Heimdall tells him. “And often do.”

“... Oh.”  _Wow._

“Would you like to know what I see?”

This time, when Bruce looks away from the stars and turns his wide eyes toward Heimdall, he finds Heimdall looking right back at him, with a disarmingly kind smile on his face.

“I… I don’t know,” Bruce answers honestly.

He could ask. He could ask about Earth, about  _anyone,_ and Heimdall would be able to tell him exactly how they are, where they’re at, what they’re doing.

Anyone at all.

He finds himself thinking, again, of what Thor said. Friends, family.  _Surely everyone’s missed you._ But Bruce doesn’t have any family, not really. Friends, sure. There’s Nat and Tony and Steve. But family? There was kind of the one kid in Kolkata, for a while, but she had her own family, really. And there was Betty, but he doubts she’d want to see him again after he disappeared like he did.

As for blood relatives… Yeah. Not gonna go there. Definitely not gonna go there.

He shrugs and says, again, “I don't know.”

And Heimdall doesn't press him.

 

* * *

 

“I wonder what’s changed since I’ve been gone.”

They’re on a planet that Bruce has already forgotten the name of, a planet completely dominated by markets and restaurants and trading posts. The perfect place to make a pit stop for supplies and, apparently, to stop for a drink. He, Thor, and Loki are all sitting at a circular table amidst a churning crowd of blue-skinned aliens, taking a break from haggling for supplies.

“Oh, loads of things, I’m sure,” Thor answers him. What must be the biggest glass of beer Bruce has ever  _seen_ sits cradled between his hands.

Loki huffs a laugh, idly swirling a round-bottomed glass in his palm. The bright purple drink inside lets off a spark of some kind of electricity every time he swirls it. Bruce keeps getting distracted by it. He says, “One can only hope.”

“Uh… right,” Bruce says. “Yeah. A lot can happen in two years, I guess.”

“For sure,” says Thor.

“I still feel bad, though, you know? Disappearing like I did. Making people worry.”

Thor takes a gulp from his beer — the foam clings to his mustache until he looks like he walked straight out of one of those old milk commercials — and he shrugs. “I wouldn’t feel too bad about that,” he says. “After all, you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Oh,  _here_ we go,” Loki mutters, rolling his eyes as he takes a sip from his drink.

Bruce raises an eyebrow at Loki, getting the distinct feeling that he’s missing something, but Loki doesn’t seem to notice.

“It could be worse,” Thor says, apparently ignoring his brother. “You could have, for instance, purposely disappeared. Say, by faking your very gruesome, very realistic death, and then you could have posed as someone else right under everyone’s noses for years. That would have been far worse.”

Loki groans, dropping his glass onto the table with a loud  _plunk._ “Would you let that  _go,_ already?”

“Not any time soon, no.”

“You…?” Bruce starts to ask, putting the pieces together. “You faked your death?”

“I—”

“Yes, he did,” Thor interrupts, lifting his beer for another sip. “I thought my brother dead for years, only to find it was all a farce.”

“I was facing a  _life sentence,”_ Loki defends, shooting a glare at Thor. “You would have done the very same thing in my place—”

“Really,” Thor says, dropping his glass with an even louder  _thunk_ on the table. “Really?”

“Yes,  _really,”_ Loki says, his voice dropping several octaves with that last word, in an almost… creepily accurate mockery of Thor’s voice. “If you had devoted even half the time you spent practicing with that hammer to learning any sort of real magic—”

“I wouldn’t have made you  _watch me die_ —”

“Honestly, I don’t know why we’re even arguing this,” Loki interrupts, suddenly all quiet and cavalier. The change in tone is almost dizzying, which, Bruce figures, was probably his intention. Loki casually lifts his glass for another sip and says, “I thought you dead, too, when I landed on Sakaar. By all accounts, I would say that makes us even.”

Thor blinks, his one eye wide. He opens his mouth to argue, then shuts it, then opens it again.

And then he smacks Loki in the back of the head.

 _“Ow,_ you—!” Loki starts to shout, and a very tiny, very pointy knife shimmers into existence in his free hand.

“You thought I was dead for a mere  _two weeks,”_ Thor argues. “I thought you were dead for—  _ow!”_

Loki’s just sunk that very tiny, very pointy knife into the side of Thor's bare upper arm, digging in somewhere between his bicep and triceps. And Thor, all at once, flinches away with a yelp and manifests a bright crackle of lightning in his opposite palm. Bruce leans back in his seat, wide-eyed, trying to put as much distance between him and them as he can.

The streak of electricity travels in a white-blue arc until it makes contact with the back of Loki’s neck.

_“Ow!”_

“And not to mention, you just assumed I was dead!” Thor argues, as Loki angrily tries to flatten out the parts of his hair that are now standing up of their own accord, sizzling with static. “You didn’t see it happen!”

Quicker than Bruce can blink, Loki summons yet another tiny knife, but this time Thor manages to catch him by the wrist before he can hit his target.

So, naturally, Loki smacks him in the forehead with his other hand.

“Ow,” Thor complains, “you  _little—!”_

“Boys, boys,” comes the Valkyrie’s voice from a few yards away. “Settle down, would you? You’re both pretty.”

She easily parts the crowds on her way to their table, and without asking any of them to make room for her to sit, she nudges both Thor and Loki aside and inserts herself between them. Thor moves without a word of complaint, though Bruce sees his cheeks are tinged a bit redder than they were, his eyes now only on the Valkyrie. It’s as if —  _that_ quickly — he’s forgotten about his and Loki’s argument altogether.

Loki, on the other hand, visibly simmers as he scoots aside on the circular bench, bringing him directly across the table from Thor and right beside Bruce. They’re practically bumping elbows — or they would be, if Bruce wasn’t still leaning carefully back in his seat. Loki shoots another mild glare at Thor, then glances from Thor to the Valkyrie and back to Thor again. At the sight of… something, maybe Thor blushing, Loki rolls his eyes, and Bruce  _swears_ he sees Loki half-stick his tongue out, too, like he’s pretending to gag right before he returns his attention to his fizzing purple drink.

The Valkyrie, prying one tall silver can from the six-pack she’s just plunked down on the table, starts a conversation with Thor about how the prices here are god-awful.

And Bruce…

Bruce is still kind of weirded out by the entire argument he was just unwittingly made a part of.

After a moment, he shakes himself out of it. He looks to Thor first, finding him absolutely engrossed in whatever the Valkyrie’s telling him — a story about how she haggled for the six-pack, he thinks.

When he looks to his left, he finds Loki regarding him over the rim of his glass.

“What?” Bruce asks, lowly enough that Thor and Val either won’t notice or won’t bother to notice. “What’s the look for?”

“I was going to ask you the very same thing,” Loki says.

“Oh,” Bruce says, thrown off. “Yeah. Um. Right.”

Loki raises an eyebrow, as if to ask:  _Well?_

“I, uh— I don’t know,” he answers, shaking his head.

Loki doesn’t let up on the suspicious, narrow-eyed stare.

And Bruce sighs, deciding to just go with the truth, because… Well, why not?

“It’s just, I always knew you two were brothers, ‘cause he told us you were,” Bruce says with shrug and a nod toward Thor, who’s now taken to resting his chin on his hand as he listens to the Valkyrie’s story. “Back in New York, you know. But I guess it never really occurred to me that you guys are actually…” He waves a hand vaguely in Thor’s direction, which Thor still doesn’t notice. “I dunno,  _brothers._ Like, with the petty arguing and everything.”

For another moment, Loki still just watches him with a raised eyebrow.

A bit of hair at the back of his head is still standing straight out, suspended by static. Bruce wonders if he should tell him about it. For the first time, too, he tries to imagine Loki as a kid, tries to imagine both him and Thor as kids, wonders how many times Loki’s hair has ended up looking exactly like this because of their weird fights.

 _And he stabbed me,_ Bruce remembers Thor recounting.  _We were eight, at the time._

But was that eight in Asgardian years? Or Earth years? Bruce hadn’t thought to ask.

Loki shrugs, finally pulling Bruce from his thoughts, and as he returns his attention to his drink he says, “For fifteen hundred very long years, yes.”

“… Huh,” Bruce says, because it’s all he can really think to say. He’s still having trouble even figuring out what a young version of Thor would even look like, if he’s being honest. Let alone Loki.

He glances away to look at Thor. Both he and the Valkyrie might as well have forgotten that they aren’t the only ones at the table, and she’s just rolled her eyes and reached up to wipe away some of that white foam from Thor’s upper lip, consequently turning Thor’s cheeks from mildly pink to abright searing red. She doesn’t seem to notice. Or she does notice, and she just likes pretending that she doesn’t.

Loki meets Bruce’s eyes over the rim of his glass. And this time there’s no mistaking it; he definitely pretends to gag, tongue sticking out and all, like he’s a  _teenager_ and not a literal centuries-old God.

Bruce can’t help letting out a startled laugh — but he covers it up decently enough with a well-timed cough.

 

* * *

 

He was the Hulk for four weeks and five days following the destruction of Asgard. Thirty-three days.

All told, he lasted as himself, as just  _Bruce,_ for six.

It happened so quickly he barely even realized what happened at all. All he knew was that there was a breach in the starboard hull of the ship, alarms whirring throughout every hall, an asteroid or a stray bit of space debris that hit the outer wall a little too hard. And Bruce was close to the breach, close enough to investigate, to make sure no one was hurt, to see if maybe he could repair the breach himself before it had the chance get any worse.

Kind of a stupid move, in retrospect.

On a ship filled with superpowered, practically immortal aliens, he’d gone and forgotten that he was the one and only person on board who wouldn’t be able to survive without oxygen for longer than a few minutes.

And the breach was worse than he had expected, worse than the alarms had made it appear. He’d taken one step into the room the alarms had indicated —  _one single step,_ and had enough time to witness the thin crack in the steel outer wall opening wide like a tear in parchment paper. His ears popped. His feet lost contact with the floor. He remembers a jolt of fear, the telltale quickening of his pulse, and a burst of pain in the back of his head.

And then —

Then the Big Guy was in charge.

Bruce can only remember… flashes. Fear, his own. Anger, definitely the Hulk’s. Panic, maybe belonging to both of them. He remembers cold,  _numb,_ he remembers a vague sense that he can’t move — or he can, but anything he does, any movement he makes, it doesn’t matter, none of it _matters,_  he can’t  _get_ anywhere, and that only makes him  _more_ angry, and —

Time passes.

He’s not sure how much of it.

The Hulk probably isn’t sure, either.

By the time his anger recedes, by the time his heart rate starts to come down and the cloudiness in his mind is blotted away, by the time that all-too-familiar fatigue settles into his every muscle and seems to seep all the way down into the marrow of his bones, he has no idea whether it’s been seconds or minutes or hours.

Steel grey swims in front of him, but his vision takes some time to clear. He’s still freezing, from the tips of his fingers up through his torso all the way down to his toes, and — wait, still?  _Still_ freezing? Has he been freezing this whole time? What happened—?

Oh, crap.

_Crap._

He turned into the Hulk on the  _Statesman,_ in a part of the ship that was already damaged, already fit to burst. He turned into the Hulk on a ship surrounded by a bunch of innocent people, with no big bad monster to direct the Big Guy’s attention away, and —

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, shaking his head.  Someone is standing in front of him, he realizes that now, talking to him, but he can’t make out their words. All he can see in his mind’s eye is Johannesburg, demolished skyscrapers, crushed cars, news anchors reporting on innocent people missing or injured or hospitalized or much, much worse. “I’m sorry — I didn’t think it’d… I didn’t — I didn’t hurt anyone, did I?”

It’s Thor, he realizes belatedly, as his vision clears. Of course it’s Thor.

Thor, and Valkyrie, she’s there, too, both of them staring wide-eyed at him like they think he’s lost his damn mind.

“Banner —”

“Tell me I didn’t hurt anyone,” he breathes out. “Please.”

His heart rate is climbing right on back up again, but he clamps down on that before it can escalate. He closes his eyes. Breathes.  _Seven counts in, hold for four, eleven counts out, seven counts in, hold for four, eleven counts out._ His fingers and toes are still freezing, but Thor’s hand on his shoulder is a point of almost startling warmth.

Before he can fully register what causes it, that warmth spreads all over, across his back and down his arms.

Then he realizes why — Thor’s hugging him. Bruce feels himself go tense at first, it’s involuntary. But the next moment is involuntary, too, in which he just sinks into it, drops his forehead somewhere around Thor’s sternum. A hand moves gently up and down his back. Not Thor’s, it’s too small. Must be the Valkyrie’s.

“You didn’t hurt anyone,” Thor says, voice rumbling softly in his chest. Maybe not the first time. It’s the first time Bruce hears it, though.

“You’re…” Bruce starts to ask. He gulps, squeezes his eyes shut. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Thor tells him.

The hand on his back trails its way up toward his head, fingers carding through his hair, and the Valkyrie says, “Except for yourself, turns out.  _Oof.”_ She hisses through her teeth. “Got a nasty little cut there, didn't you?”

Thor slowly releases him, steps back, keeps one hand on Bruce’s shoulder. That one blue eye of his swims with concern. He glances up at Val, who’s still looking at what is apparently a cut on the back of Bruce's head, her nose wrinkling, and he asks Bruce, “Are you feeling alright?”

“What—? Yeah, I’m…” Bruce trails off. “I really didn’t hurt anyone?”

“Relax, little guy,” Val says, exasperated. She’s taken to calling him that, lately, completely disregarding the fact that he’s still got four or five inches on her when he’s  _not_ the Hulk. Then she winces, glancing at the back of his head again. “And… maybe don't get up too fast, either. God, you Midgardians are frail as paper, aren’t you?”

“You didn’t hurt anyone,” Thor tells him again. “We were just worried about you. You were sucked out into open space through a breach in the hull. Must have hit your head on your way out, too. Thank God the Hulk took over, or—”

“Or you’d be toast,” says Val.

_Thank God the Hulk took over._

Wow.

That’s… not a sentiment he’s used to hearing. It’s only the second time  _ever,_ actually, the first being when Tony had said that the Hulk might have saved him from dying of gamma radiation all those years ago. The Hulk saved his life, he’d said, and it was a good thing he did. Maybe he even saved it for something greater.

Bruce still doesn't know how he feels about the latter sentiment. The former, though, he thinks he might actually be starting to believe. A little.

A nervous smile tugs at one corner of his mouth, but that’s about all he can manage. “Sorry,” he says. “I, uh… I’m not really used to being around people who can, you know, handle the Other Guy the way you guys can. Guess you guys wouldn’t have let me hurt anyone anyway, huh?”

Valkyrie snorts, then delivers a swift punch to his upper arm. It’s a light punch, by her standards, barely even enough to bruise. “Course not, little guy. You’re in good company.”

Bruce gulps, not sure what to say to that, not at first. His heart rate is just about back to normal, a dull thumping and a throb that, now, periodically sharpens into a spike through the back of his skull — his nerves belatedly recognizing his injury, now that the adrenaline’s faded. He’s gonna need a trip to the ship’s infirmary for sure, but he didn’t hurt anyone. Not a single person, or alien, or monster, or anything.

That’s definitely a first.

“Yeah,” Bruce finally says. “Yeah, I am.”

 

* * *

 

“Dr. Banner.”

“Hey,” Bruce answers, hands in his pockets as he traverses the bridge to where Heimdall stands. He gestures with a tilt of his head toward the bit of tiled floor just beside where Asgard’s Gatekeeper has elected to keep his watch tonight, and he asks, “This spot taken?”

“Not at all,” Heimdall answers without looking away from the stars.

Bruce nods, stepping up beside him. Their side-by-side images are reflected faintly in the vast window, a pair of semitransparent silhouettes beyond which stretches the kaleidoscope of the Universe.

 _Maybe I should start writing this stuff down,_ he thinks, his eyes jumping from one galaxy to the next, from star to star, from distant nebulas to the planets that are close enough to seem larger than pinpricks.

“Just Bruce is fine, by the way,” he says, because it occurs to him that he hasn’t, yet.

Heimdall nods. “Just Bruce it is, then,” he answers with a smile, and he shoots a look toward Bruce out of the corner of his eye, one eyebrow raised. “So, should I ask what brings you out to the bridge at so late an hour again, Just Bruce?”

With a shrug, Bruce brushes right past the jibe and asks, “Would you believe I just thought you could use the company?”

The small smile on Heimdall’s face widens with amusement, almost a laugh, before he looks out to the stars again. “I’m flattered.”

“Well, I mean it,” Bruce says. “And I was up anyway. Never really had the best of sleep schedules, you know. Any healthy habits I might have had once — and don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t much to begin with — they all got sucked out of me sometime in grad school. Got a nasty caffeine addiction, too.”

“Is that so?”

“Mm-hmm. Plus, spending some time as the Hulk always knocks me out for a while. I just got done a two or three day nap,” Bruce says. “Last thing I need right now is sleep.”

Heimdall gives a slow, thoughtful nod. “I see. I take it you’re no longer kept awake by thoughts of Earth, then.”

The mention isn’t unexpected; he knew Heimdall would get around to that subject sooner rather than later.

Bruce chews on the inside of his cheek, and he hesitates, wondering how best to put it.

“I still think of Earth pretty often,” he admits eventually, and he catches himself before he describes the feeling as  _homesickness._ Feels a little insensitive, when Earth is still very much in one piece. “I do miss it, or… parts of it, anyway. Certain places. Certain people. Tony and Nat and the rest of those guys, it’ll be nice seeing them again, letting them know I’m okay. But… it doesn’t keep me up anymore. Doesn’t make me as nervous, thinking about going back.”

“And why,” says Heimdall, “might you suppose that is?”

“Honestly?” Bruce asks, and then he gives another shrug. “Because I’m fine where I’m at. I got people that care about me on Earth, sure, people I care about. But…”

He sighs, thinking not just of the Asgardian standing beside him but of all the others, too. Thor and Val. All the kids that never seem to run out of the most  _bizarre_ questions to ask him. The men and women that tug him into conversations, put an arm around his shoulders like they’ve known him forever, shove drinks into his hands before he can think to refuse. Hell, even Loki, sometimes. Occasionally. Like a weird, estranged cousin or something.

“But,” Bruce says, “I’ve got the same thing here, too, you know?”

Heimdall’s contented smile returns, and he nods, his hands folded over the hilt of his sword. “Yes, Bruce,” he answers. “I believe I do.”


End file.
